For Filmmaker, ‘Sicko’ Is a Jumping-Off Point for Health Care Change

[marmar]

from the NY Times, via MichaelMoore.com:


For Filmmaker, ‘Sicko’ Is a Jumping-Off Point for Health Care Change


By Kevin Sack / New York Times

The cameramen shuffled backward through a Capitol Hill corridor, as reporters from Tokyo and Paris strained to capture the campaigner’s every word. An entourage of handlers, with cellphones to their ears, kept the scrum moving toward the door. A van was waiting, its engine running. “Keep moving, people,” one aide barked. “Keep moving. We’ve got to go.”

Barack Obama in the House? Perhaps Fred Thompson?

Try Michael Moore, the guerrilla filmmaker, his plaid shirt untucked in the back, on the latest stop, held Wednesday, in a Barnumesque promotional tour that has taken on the trappings and purpose of a tightly managed political campaign.

As he moved from Sacramento to New York and on to Washington this week, Mr. Moore has not just set out to sell tickets to “Sicko,” his cinematic indictment of the American health care system. He has also pushed his prescription for reform: a single-payer system, with the government as insurer, that would guarantee access to health care for all Americans and put the private insurance industry out of business.

Whether embracing Mr. Moore’s remedy or disdaining it, elected officials and policy experts agreed last week that the film was likely to have broad political impact, perhaps along the lines of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s jeremiad on global warming. It will, they predicted, crystallize the frustration that is a pre-existing condition for so many health care consumers.

Well before the film’s June 29 national release (it opened Friday on one New York screen), politicians on the left began lining up to associate themselves with Mr. Moore. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9935

[Kokonoe]

1. It sure would be nice.